Artist:

Jessie Matthews

Jessie Matthews, OBE (11 March 1907 – 19 August 1981) was an English actress, dancer and singer of the 1930s, whose career continued into the post-war period. Jessie Margaret Matthews was born in Soho, London, in relative poverty, the seventh of sixteen children (of whom eleven survived) of a fruit and vegetable seller. She debuted on stage on 29 December 1919, aged 12, in Bluebell in Fairyland, by Seymour Hicks, music by Charles Taylor, at the Metropolitan Music Hall, Edgware Road, London, as a child dancer; she made her film debut in 1923 in the silent film The Beloved Vagabond.